There’s nothing quite as easy on the eyes as timeworn columns jutting out of every storied building, cornering every city street, bathed in the evening glow of a sun setting late one night in Paris. Insert awkward – knowing, but awkward – twenty something into the frame half-dancing to the pace of a self-timed camera to the part surprise, part carelessness of French passersby and the picture coming into view becomes something quite different.

Ever the shy subject in front of the beholder’s camera, I’m becoming unglued from the promised insurance that everything gets easier with practice. University, for one. Shooting self-portraits in broad daylight, for two. And confidence, well, for ever.

This anxiety, of course, is mixed three shots deep into a heavy cocktail of lack-of-sleep-because-jetlag, another semester ripe with new teaching styles to get used to and old habits to shake off, and the comedown of a five week-long transcontinental holiday replete with the twenty-something degree drop in temperature that came along with it. Can I get a ‘Brrrr, it’s cold in here. There must be something in the atmosphere’?

Nevermind.

Climate of worldly turbulence aside [though in no way taking away from its importance], Paris could not have come at a better time. If what little of my academic confidence had solidified into the tiniest bedrock of my personality at the beginning of last semester, it was forcibly crushed in the coming weeks.

Precisely, come undone by a running commentary of ways in which I could improve and ways in which I had so obviously failed. The critical takeaway, after all is said and done, of course being that one never stops learning.

[And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.]